Enrico Fermi

Enrico
Fermi; Interestingly the blackboard contains an error: in the equation for
alpha, h bar and e are the wrong way around

Enrico
Fermi, (born September 29, 1901 in Rome, Italy; died 29 November 1954)
was an Italian-American physicist most noted for his work on beta decay, the development
of the first nuclear reactor and for the development of quantum theory. Fermi
won the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Fermi
led the construction of the first nuclear pile, which produced the first controlled
nuclear chain reaction. He was one of the great leaders of the Manhattan Project.

Fermi is known as the originator of the Fermi paradox in SETI research, when
in a discussion of the possibility that intelligent aliens might exist, he famously
asked "Where are they?"

Fermions, as well as the Fermi National Accelerator
Laboratory, are named in his honor. In addition, the element fermium and Fermi
statistics were named in his honor. The Enrico Fermi US Presidential Award was
established in 1956 in memory of Fermi's achievements and excellence as a scientist.
The department of the University of Chicago where he used to work is now known
as The Enrico Fermi Institute, and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab),
was also named in his honor.

Fermi problems, such as the classic "How many
piano tuners are there in Chicago?" are named after Fermi's use of such estimation
problems to teach students the importance of dimensional analysis, approximation
methods, and clear identification of assumptions.

Fermi was inseparable in childhood from his brother Giulio, who
was just one year older. In 1915, Giulio died during minor surgery for a throat
abscess. Enrico, desolate, threw himself into the study of physics largely as
a way of coping with his pain.

A friend of the family, Adolfo Amidei, guided
Fermi's study of algebra, trigonometry, analytic geometry, calculus and theoretical
mechanics. Amidei also suggested Fermi attend not the University of Rome but to
apply to the prestigious "Scuola Normale Superiore" of Pisa, a special university-college
for selected gifted students. The examiner at the Scuola Normale thought the 17-year-old
Fermi's competition essay worthy of a doctoral exam. The examiner summoned Fermi
and predicted he would become a great scientist.

In 1918 he attended university at the Pisa Institute where he
graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1922. In 1923 Fermi spent 6 months in Göttingen
at Max Born's school, but was not happy with the excessively formal theoretical
style of the leading school of quantum physics at the time. In 1924 he was in
Leiden, Netherlands, to meet Paul Ehrenfest, and here he also met Einstein. Fermi
took a professorship in Rome (the first course in theoric physics, created for
him by professor Orso Maria Corbino, director of the Institute of Physics). Corbino
worked a lot to help Fermi in selecting his team, which soon was joined by notable
minds like Edoardo Amaldi, Bruno Pontecorvo, Franco Rasetti, Emilio Segrč. For
the theoretic studies only, Ettore Majorana too took part in what was soon nicknamed
the Group of "the Boys of via Panisperna" (by the name of the road in which the
Institute had its labs - now in the Viminale complex, dicastery of police).

The
group went on with its now famous experiments, but in 1933 Rasetti left Italy
for Canada and United States, Pontecorvo went to France, Segrč preferred to go
teaching in Palermo.

In 1938, Fermi won the Nobel Prize in Physics
for his "demonstrations of the existence of new radioactive elements produced
by neutron irradiation, and for his related discovery of nuclear reactions brought
about by slow neutrons."

He, his wife Laura, and their children, departed immediately
from Stockholm, where Fermi received the prize, to New York, where he began a
new life in the United States.

When he was awarded the Nobel Prize; Fascism
had released its racial laws, so Fermi (whose wife Laura Capon was of Jewish religion)
after the prize immediately emigrated to New York and began working at Columbia
University.

After arriving at Columbia he verified the initial nuclear fission
experiment of Hahn and Strassman (with the help of Booth and Dunning). Fermi then
began the construction of the first nuclear pile at Columbia.

Fermi recalled
the beginning of the project in a speech given in 1954 when he retired as President
of the American Physical Society:

"I remember very vividly the first
month, January, 1939, that I started working at the Pupin Laboratories because
things began happening very fast. In that period, Niels Bohr was on a lecture
engagement in Princeton and I remember one afternoon Willis Lamb came back very
excited and said that Bohr had leaked out great news. The great news that had
leaked out was the discovery of fission and at least the outline of its interpretation.
Then, somewhat later that same month, there was a meeting in Washington where
the possible importance of the newly discovered phenomenon of fission was first
discussed in semi-jocular earnest as a possible source of nuclear power."

After
the famous letter signed by Albert Einstein (transcribed by Leo Szilard) to President
Roosevelt in 1939, the Navy awarded Columbia University the first Atomic Energy
funding of $6,000, which grew into the Manhattan Project under and Fermi's work.

In Fermi's 1954 address to the APS he also said, "Well, this brings us to Pearl
Harbor. That is the time when I left Columbia University, and after a few months
of commuting between Chicago and New York eventually moved to Chicago to keep
up the work there, and from then on, with a few notable exceptions, the work at
Columbia was concentrated on the isotope separation phase of the atomic energy
project, initiated by Booth, Dunning and Urey about 1940."

Fermi was a man
of enormous brilliance, mental agility and common sense. He was a very gifted
theorist, as his theory of beta decay proves. He was equally gifted in the lab,
working very fast and with great insight. Fermi often credited his speed in the
lab for having won him the Nobel Prize, saying the discoveries would soon have
been made by someone else -- he just got there first.

When he submitted his
famous paper on beta decay to the prestigious journal Nature, the journal's
editor turned it down because "it contained speculations which were too remote
from reality." Thus, Fermi saw the theory published in Italian and in German before
it was published in English.

He never forgot this experience of being ahead
of his time, and used to tell his protegés: "Never be first; try to be second."

On November
29, 1954 Fermi died of cancer in Chicago, Illinois and was interred there in the
Oak Woods Cemetery. He was 53. As Eugene Wigner wrote: "Ten days before Fermi
had passed away he told me, 'I hope it won't take long.' He had reconciled himself
perfectly to his fate."